The Fakir was sitting cross-legged on a charpai, dressed in a lungi and banyan, and surrounded by drying laundry. Farida Sayed, as she sat herself on the wooden stool in front of him, imagined he was surrounded by the scent of flowers and a cool breeze. For the past hour, Farida had been stuck in an autorickshaw, struggling through traffic to Chittagong’s Hali Shar to deliver a message from her husband, Major Sayed Farooq-ur-Rahman, to the powerful mystic Andha Hafiz. In just hours, the Major would stage Bangladesh’s first coup d’état—but first, he needed to be sure the mystic saw doom in his enemy’s stars.
“Forget it,” Bangladesh’s founding patriarch and president, Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, told the young officers who arrived in his office to kill him, “The Pakistan army couldn’t do it.”
That evening, fifty years ago this August, Sheikh Mujib would be killed with much of his family, the journalist and author Anthony Mascarenhas recorded. The assassins even shot dead his daughters-in-law as well as his youngest son, twelve-year-old Russel.
For weeks now, many in Bangladesh have been wondering if the country’s dysfunctional democracy is again driving it toward military rule. Large-scale mob violence, often pitting young people against police, continues to claim lives six months after it forced Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from office. Economic distress persists, and religious minorities continue to face attack.
Even as coup rumours circulate around Dhaka, though, there’s reason to suspect that taking power isn’t a choice army chief General Waker-Uz-Zaman would willingly make. Ever since 1991, when democracy was restored in the country, the country’s parties have institutionalised factionalism within the military, creating systems that chain the Generals not to the state but to patronage networks run by the political leadership.
Far from consolidating military authority, the coup of 1975 ushered in a brutal power struggle within its ranks. Andha Hafiz, the blind mystic whose counsel Major Farooq sought, did not see the depth of the tide of blood that he was unleashing.
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A flailing republic
The moment of Bangladesh’s birth as a republic did not see the army distinguish itself: “A 31-gun salute intended to grandly mark the occasion petered out after five rounds and had to be replaced by rifle and automatic fire,” Mascarenhas wryly writes. There was little, in any case, to be celebrating. Two years after independence, food shortages had become chronic, escalating into full-blown famine by March 1974. The economist Mohiuddin Alamgir watched “streams of hungry people—men, women, and children—who were nothing but skeletons, trek into towns in search of food.” Few survived the march, even to the Government’s gruel kitchens.
As anthropologist Willem van Schendel has written, massive floods were in part responsible for the crisis, but it was clear that the corruption of the ruling élite sharpened the crisis.
To make things worse, Mujib paid little attention to governance, often confusing policies with platitudes. The government responded to mass protests with coercion, jailing demonstrators and opposition politicians. The 94-year-old socialist cleric Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani was among those held.
“Longhaired boys with green or black berets, dark glasses and Castro’s beards would tear through the streets in stolen jeeps and cars,” the journalist Anthony Mascarenhas reported of the anarchy that grew after 1974. “Sometimes they carried rifles and sten guns. Sometimes not. But if they didn’t get their way when demands were made in shops or houses, the intended victims knew they would return after dark with the guns.
Elsewhere, groups of barefoot young men in lungis—sometimes claiming to have been Mukti Bahini freedom fighters—ambled through rural markets, helping themselves to eggs, fish, vegetables and cash.
Among its most economically damaging measures was the Awami League’s decision to nationalise some 85 per cent of the industry and acquire a monopoly of about 90 per cent of foreign trade. Scholar Talukder Maniruzzaman has written that licensed dealers, most of whom were Awami League cadre, distributed both locally produced and imported goods.
The new government increasingly turned to repression, facing attacks from Maoists in several districts. In December 1974, Mujib proclaimed a state of emergency and dismantled what little remained of the constitution the following year by instituting a one-party state led by the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League, or Baskal.
The scholar Habibul Haque Khondker argues that this one-party state rested on weak foundations. Fearing the power of popular individual commanders—among them the legendary Kader ‘Tiger’ Siddiqui—also meant that many individuals who played a key role in the freedom movement were sidelined. Awami League politicians with no role in the war nor experience in governance came to control the bureaucracy. Large numbers of commanders from the ranks of the Mukti Bahni, meanwhile, turned from military life to careers in politics.
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Putsch after putsch
Farooq’s coup of August 1975 did not last long. The clique of major-rank officers who made the coup chose not to return to their military duties and instead operated a government from the President’s official residence. To protect it, they placed a unit of the Bengal Lancers regiment and a tank unit with four Russian T-54s—donated by Egypt in return for a shipment of Bengali tea. Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad, among Sheikh Mujib’s closest political aides declared himself president—and promptly ordered the killing of his most prominent colleagues.
The new regime promptly replaced the military service chief, General KM Shafiullah. Air Vice Marshal AK Khondekar. Their replacements, General Ziaur Rahman and Air Vice-Marshal MG Ghulam Tawab, however, understood that absolute power now lay with the young officers, not the military’s chain of command.
Thus, a second coup d’état was staged in November 1975, this time by the army’s senior leadership. Like the first coup, the circumstances were chaotic. General Zia, the army chief, refused to support the coup plotters clearly and was placed under house arrest. The second most senior army officer, General HM Ershad, was away in India, attending a staff course. Thus, the task fell to the chief of general staff and third-most senior in the chain of command, Brigadier Khaled Musharraf.
To assert the legitimacy of his actions, though, the Brigadier insisted on being appointed army chief, an appeal the President flatly rejected. Brigadier Khaled then persuaded the chiefs of the navy and air force to pin his badges of rank onto his uniform—a bizarre spectacle, Khondker notes, that was published in five columns in all local papers the next morning.
Facing off against the tank units of the Bengal Lancers, which threatened to fight until the last, a deal was eventually struck, granting the officers who assassinated Sheikh Mujib safe passage.
The leaders of the November coup, though, lacked a clear political plan and initially allowed the cabinet and parliament to continue as they had. To the military’s embarrassment, some in parliament protested the coup. Following this, the leaders of the November coup dissolved both the existing parliament and the cabinet. They installed the chief justice of the Supreme Court as a nonpartisan, neutral president. General Zia was forced to resign his commission.
Fearing for his life, Zia now appealed to his old comrade, Lieutenant-Colonel Abu Taher, for help. Together with cadre of the clandestine, Left-wing Biplobi Shainik Sangstha, Taher moved in Zia’s support. Khaled and his supporters sought refuge in the headquarters of the 10 Bengal regiment. There, however, they were killed by rebellious soldiers—the first mutiny of its kind, scholar Lawrence Lifschultz has noted, since the anti-colonial rebellion of 1857.
Lieutenant-Colonel Taher and General Zia eventually found themselves on opposite sides of what soon developed into a full-scale mutiny. Enlisted men ripped the badges off the uniforms of their officers, Lifschultz writes, and demanded the installation of revolutionary committees to administer the army. General Zia emerged victorious from the power struggle, and the rebels were crushed.
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Lessons learned?
Following the 1975 crisis, General Zia set up the Bangladesh National Party. Rivals in the military eventually assassinated him after he survived 29 coup attempts. Scholar Sarah Tasnim Shehabuddin observes that his successor, HM Ershad, succeeded in bribing his colonels to remain loyal but proved unable to survive the combined opposition of Hasina and Khalida. The Generals had, however, learned the key lesson: To intervene in politics was to risk dividing the Army against itself, opening the path to mutiny.
Among the key reasons Bangladesh’s military remains reluctant to mount coups are the legacies of those troubled decades. The political establishment, moreover, nurtured these divisions. In Pakistan, Generals are directly tied to the state through generous grants of land and post-retirement appointments into military-controlled businesses. In Bangladesh, like in India and other civilian democracies, political patronage holds the keys to success.
General Waker-Uz-Zaman knows Bangladesh is rapidly running out of time, but taking charge of its destiny could end up splintering the army along ideological lines and opening the path to civil war. There’s no telling when he’ll decide, the clock is running out on time to take a call.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)